the pale blue eye movie review

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One thing a movie watcher might not be looking for during the actual bleak midwinter is more bleak midwinter on the screen. Full disclosure: “The Pale Blue Eye,” written and directed by Scott Cooper and starring his frequent collaborator Christian Bale , set in New York’s more-rugged-than-today Hudson Valley in 1830, is thoroughly suffused with bleak mid-winterness. Masanobu Takayanagi ’s cinematography sometimes reproduces a gorgeous kind of grayscale, broken up by flashes of blue water and the blue uniforms of the cadets of the West Point Military Academy, the then-fledgling institution at which much of the story’s action is set.

The chilliness fits the story of course. At the Academy, a cadet, named Fry, is discovered not just dead—by hanging, it is first presumed—but with his heart cut out. The extremely spooked overseers of the school, fearful of scandal that might strike a death blow to the place, enlist a retired lawman to investigate.

Augustus Landor, played by Bale, is a solitary “cottager,” a widower whose not-quite-adult daughter left his home a couple of years prior. He likes to drink, has a sleeping partner in a warm-hearted tavern owner ( Charlotte Gainsbourg ), and is prone to melancholy despite his dry wit. He is reputed to have once gotten a confession from a criminal using nothing more than a “piercing look.”

Removing the hearts of corpses—there will be another—is suggestive of quite a bit. And soon Landor is sniffing into matters of devil worship. One cadet who’s been observing the detective doesn’t find that lead a credible one. The killer, he insists, was “a poet.”

This cadet is one Edgar Allan Poe , a sensitive outcast among militaristic braggarts and of course a future poet himself. Uncannily played by Harry Melling , who was similarly haunting in “ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ,” Poe is taken under Landor’s wing. The duo takes a particular interest in the academy’s doctor, Daniel Marquis ( Toby Jones ), and his family. This clan could give the Addamses a run for its money. Mrs. Marquis is given to breaking the household china at less than a moment’s notice. Daughter Lea ( Lucy Boynton ) plays the piano beautifully and is very breathy and suffers from what is referred to here as “the falling sickness.” Of course, Edgar falls in love with her—all the other boys at West Point have as well. Lea observes that Edgar’s morbidity suits him well, and he in turn recites to her his poetic meditations on “Lenore.” The story’s title is derived thereof.

Adapted from a novel by Louis Bayard , “The Pale Blue Eye” is one of those mysteries that features such a limited cast of characters/suspects that its main narrative seems a feint of sorts, and it is. To wit: If you’re wondering why an actor as formidable as Bale signed on to a role in which he solves a couple of murders and contributes to the development of a great American literary figure and not much else, well, he didn’t. It’s only after the supposedly central mystery is solved that “The Pale Blue Eye” fully commits to its actual business, serving up in full a tale of loss and wrong-headed resolution. Bale’s characterization, subtle and slightly enigmatic throughout, here blooms. And eventually sears. The movie honors the real-life figure who would, among other things, become the arguable creator of the American detective story, while in its own right turning a shudder-inducing light on the darker recesses of the human heart.

On theaters today, and available on Netflix on January 6th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

Rated R for some violent content and bloody images.

128 minutes

Christian Bale as Augustus Landor

Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe

Gillian Anderson as Julia Marquis

Robert Duvall as Jean-Pepe

Timothy Spall as Superintendent Thayer

Charlotte Gainsbourg as Patsy

Lucy Boynton as Lea Marquis

Toby Jones as Dr. Daniel Marquis

Charlie Tahan as Cadet Loughborough

Harry Lawtey as Artemus Marquis

Simon McBurney as Captain Hitchcock

Scott Cooper

Writer (novel)

Louis Bayard

Cinematographer

Masanobu Takayanagi
Dylan Tichenor
Howard Shore

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‘The Pale Blue Eye’ Review: Stolen Hearts and Tortured Minds

A tormented detective and a fictional Edgar Allan Poe team up to solve grisly killings in this stuffy period melodrama.

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In a scene from the film, a man with a beard is holding a candle in a room next to a fireplace.

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Lavishly appointed and stodgy as week-old Christmas pudding, “The Pale Blue Eye” is a pulpy murder mystery bristling with florid dialogue and supernatural flourishes. Imagining a crime-solving partnership between a grouchy police detective and a fictional Edgar Allan Poe, this historical thriller cooks up overheated gothic melodrama in a wintry New York setting.

That would be the young West Point military academy in the winter of 1830. A hanged man has been found in the woods, his heart crudely removed and his injuries suggesting a male killer. At least, that’s the conclusion drawn by Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), whose storied reputation as a scourge of gangs and general miscreants precedes his arrival at the scene. A grieving widower whose daughter is mysteriously out of the picture, Landor, and his detecting skills, might be a tad ground down; but a young cadet named Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) proves a useful, if eccentric assistant. (The real Poe spent some months at West Point, but there’s no record of any sleuthing on the side.) This Poe is a rum sort, pallid and pie-eyed and with a fondness for limericks. Unsurprisingly, he is not exactly popular.

In part a Poe origin story, “The Pale Blue Eye” (adapted by the director, Scott Cooper, from Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel of the same name ) is all candlelight and shadows and blazing white landscapes. Beneath the movie’s brittle surface and plodding plot, madness and hysteria roil. A woman throws seizures and daubs her face with another’s blood; an apparition haunts Landor, and a whisper of satanic ritual leads him to the lair of a reclusive phrenologist (Robert Duvall). As the Poe-etic symbols accumulate — a squawking raven, a reference to Lenore — so, too, do the big-name supporting players: Timothy Spall as a toffee-nosed Colonel, Gillian Anderson as the batty wife of the academy’s surgeon (Toby Jones).

Continuing his fascination with tormented manhood, Cooper, in this third collaboration with Bale after “Out of the Furnace” (2013) and “Hostiles” (2017), works with a solemnity that stifles the fun. Tragedy is more in Cooper’s wheelhouse, embodied in Bale’s wincing, constipated performance. So while Landor quiets his demons in the arms of a tavern wench, it’s left to Poe to amuse us. His lovesick pursuit of the surgeon’s sickly daughter (Lucy Boynton) seems the movie’s most logical diversion, considering he enjoys chats with his dead mother and she might be conversing with the devil.

Despite an impressively bleak and nifty twist, “The Pale Blue Eye” (the title comes from Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”) is perhaps best enjoyed as a hat drama. Cadets teeter beneath helmets resembling giant coal scuttles, while their superiors barely prevent their ornate headgear from succumbing to gravity. (The ladies’ wigs, being scarcely less onerous to hold aloft, also qualify.) The real mystery here is how any of the actors made it through the movie without resorting to a neck brace.

The Pale Blue Eye Rated R for frozen corpses and an unexpected castration. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters.

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The Pale Blue Eye Reviews

Even with the strong performances of Melling, Bale, and the rest of the supporting cast, the mystery doesn’t provide a satisfying resolution despite the complex investigation that centres on the movie.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

Led by Melling, there are strong performances throughout, including a giallo-level turn by Gillian Anderson as Julia Marquis, and the always reliable Robert Duvall as Jean-Pepe, an occult scholar.

Full Review | Aug 23, 2023

Though overly reliant on its familiar score, The Pale Blue Eye strikes a rare balance between macabre mystery and prestige drama, embedding itself within a middle ground that never ceases to entice and evoke a powerful sense of pathos.

Full Review | Aug 6, 2023

Here and there, the inherent silliness of it all manages to overpower Cooper’s quest for bleakness.

Full Review | Aug 3, 2023

The Pale Blue Eye is beautiful, and its script coherent and clean. While its story may not inspire a second watch, it is a film that relishes in its tone, atmosphere, and aesthetics.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

Beautifully shot and competently acted, The Pale Blue Eye is worth a watch from the comfort of your own home. However, despite it's best effort, it may not intrigue and entertain as much as it wants to.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 24, 2023

If you have a particular passion for the Gothic, you may find this film appealing despite its flaws.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 30, 2023

Sometimes the journey is enough, even if the destination isn’t quite what we’d hoped for.

Full Review | Apr 21, 2023

I’ve never been a fan of director Scott Cooper, but this period murder mystery is one of his better films.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2023

The mood between Bale and his pale-faced literary companion seems as frosty as the wintry weather in this adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel... frost, snow, blue light, icy breath — but light on actual detective work and plot.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 2, 2023

Bale does what Bale does, inhabiting a brooding, secretive character similar to many he has played in the past, while Melling’s Poe is superb, flirting with camp caricature yet remaining nuanced and unpredictable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 1, 2023

A flurry of impeccable performances, ornately decadent costuming, a carefully choreographed color palette, and painting-perfect cinematography, all spun together by a compelling mystery and one of the best fictionalized Edgar Allan Poe's we've ever seen.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Feb 10, 2023

Bale utilizes the heavily mustachioed beardfulness he employs in all his 1800's roles, and while he can chew the scenery with the best of them, he allows Melling's scary-doll, wide-eyed E.A. Poe to upstage him. A plodding but highly engrossing watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 5, 2023

Beautiful, slow and gloomy, The Pale Blue Eye is a pleasant enough detour for any mystery and gothic devotees, although its flaws might be too glaring for some to ignore.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 3, 2023

The Pale Blue Eye ultimately feels exactly like an Edgar Allen Poe work. Ravens are present. Death beneath wood floorboards. Tortured souls and dark family secrets. It comes together like a dive into a book that comes alive.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 28, 2023

One's a world-weary alcoholic, the other's a twitchy West Point cadet with literary aspirations. Together, they fight crime.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2023

It’s a visually wow-inducing whodunit that feels dour and slow at times.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 24, 2023

Top notch acting is overcome by an unbelievable, somber plot and overly dark visuals.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jan 23, 2023

There is something ridiculous, not when it begins, but as it nears its end, which makes one want to quickly forget The Pale Blue Eye... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 23, 2023

Cooper’s direction never quite instills a sense of urgency or suspense, leaving the fine cast and promising story to feel underserviced by the script and its execution.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 21, 2023

Cast & crew
User reviews

The Pale Blue Eye

A world-weary detective is hired to investigate the murder of a West Point cadet. Stymied by the cadets' code of silence, he enlists one of their own to help unravel the case - a young man t... Read all A world-weary detective is hired to investigate the murder of a West Point cadet. Stymied by the cadets' code of silence, he enlists one of their own to help unravel the case - a young man the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe. A world-weary detective is hired to investigate the murder of a West Point cadet. Stymied by the cadets' code of silence, he enlists one of their own to help unravel the case - a young man the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe.

Scott Cooper
Louis Bayard
Christian Bale
Harry Melling
Simon McBurney
413 User reviews
177 Critic reviews
56 Metascore
1 win & 2 nominations

Augustus Landor

Cadet Edgar Allan Poe

Captain Hitchcock

Superintendent Thayer

Dr. Daniel Marquis

Cadet Artemus Marquis

Cadet Randolph Ballinger

Cadet Stoddard

Lea Marquis

Mrs. Julia Marquis

Cadet Huntoon

Cadet Horatio Cochrane

Cadet Hamilton
(as Jack Irving)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia The movie title is drawn from a passage in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843): "One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees -very gradually -I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever."
Goofs The ceiling/floor/timbers on the lower level of the ice house would be constantly damp from the melting ice on the floor above. This is further evidenced by the constant sound of dripping water when Landor investigates earlier in the film. As such, it is not realistic that fire would spread as quickly as it did, if in fact at all, when the candles are knocked over during the climactic ritual.

Augustus Landor : I do believe that the Academy takes away the young man's will. Advances him with regulations and rules. Deprives him of reason. It makes him less human.

Captain Hitchcock : Are you implying the Academy is to blame for these deaths?

Augustus Landor : Someone connected to the Academy, yes. Hence he Academy itself.

Captain Hitchcock : Well that's absurd. By your standard, every crime committed by a Christian will be a stain on Christ.

Augustus Landor : And so it is.

Connections Featured in Nightmare on Film Street: Top 10 Horror Movies of 2023! (2023)
Soundtracks Pleyel's Hymn Written by Ignace Pleyel (as Ignaz Joseph Pleyel) Performed by Peter Yarin Produced by Stewart Lerman

User reviews 413

Jan 6, 2023
How long is The Pale Blue Eye? Powered by Alexa
January 6, 2023 (United States)
United States
Official Netflix
Con Mắt Lam Vô Hồn
Westminster College, New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, USA (United States Military Academy at West Point)
Cross Creek Pictures
Grisbi Productions, Le
Streamline Global Group
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$72,000,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 8 minutes
Dolby Digital

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‘The Pale Blue Eye’ Review: Christian Bale Is a Detective Who Teams Up with Edgar Allan Poe in Scott Cooper’s Gloomfest Murder Mystery

Harry Melling plays Poe like a Benoit Blanc in training, but the film's mystery never catches fire.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ The Pale Blue Eye ” is one of those movie titles that’s evocative yet teasingly vague — it makes the film sound like a Western based on a song by Lou Reed. Actually, the movie is based on Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel, which uses an 1830s military setting and murder mystery to frame a kind of origin story of Edgar Allan Poe. At West Point, which in the early 19th century is basically a fort in the woods overlooking the Hudson River, a cadet suffers a violent death. He is cut down from a noose hanging from a tree branch (his feet were touching the ground), but it’s what happens after he dies that counts: Someone has made a vertical incision in his chest and removed his heart.

Reviewed at Paris Theater, Dec. 19, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 128 MIN.

Production: A Netflix release of a Cross Creek Pictures production, in association with Le Grisbi Productions. Producers: Scott Cooper, Christian Bale, Tyler Thompson, John Lesher. Executive producers: Tracey Landon, Dylan Weathered, Louis Bayard, Chris Sharp, Jennifer Lamb, Emily Salveson, Ryan Smith.
Crew: Director, screenplay: Scott Cooper. Camera: Masanobu Takayanagi. Editors: Dylan Tichenor. Music: Howard Shore.
With: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Simon McBurney, Timothy Spall, Robert Duvall.

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‘the pale blue eye’ review: christian bale trudges through the murk of scott cooper’s stodgy period murder mystery.

Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson and Lucy Boynton also star in Netflix’s adaptation of the Louis Bayard novel about an 1830 case at West Point military academy, where the young Edgar Allan Poe was a cadet.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The Pale Blue Eye Is Grisly, Grim, and Surprisingly Moving

The barren trees and snowy ridges of the Hudson Valley in winter have rarely looked as forbidding as they do in Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye , a mystery that’s more about mood than ingenuity. But the chill you feel in your bones may actually enhance the suspense; Cooper clearly understands that mysteries live or die on their atmosphere. Those of us for whom Sherlock Holmes served as a gateway drug into serious literature can testify to this: The Victoriana, the cobblestones and gaslight, all were just as essential as the cases themselves to our fascination, maybe more so. And now, here’s an appropriately thick, foggy counterpart to those stories, set at West Point in the 1830s, that holds its own.

Based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel, The Pale Blue Eye follows a veteran New York detective, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), living by himself in the woods, who is pulled out of retirement to investigate the grisly death of a cadet at the United States Military Academy. Leroy Fry (Matt Helm) has been found hanged with his heart cut out, and nobody can decide if it’s a suicide or murder or why it happened. The grizzled, grimacing Landor has an unspoken confrontational relationship with the school — he shows total disdain toward everyone around him — but accepts the case anyway. He then enlists as his aide an awkward young cadet, Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling), who tells him early on that the murderer they seek must be a poet. “The heart is a symbol, or it is nothing,” Poe explains. “To remove a man’s heart is to traffic in symbol. And who better equipped for such labor than a poet?”

Deep, man . Poe fascinates Landor, who starts to look at this young odd fellow with fondness. Bale has been so good for so long at playing standoffish characters that it’s bracing to see warmth toward somebody else descend upon his gaze. Landor has lost his wife to illness, and his daughter, we’re told, recently ran away from home; he came to these woods to find happiness with his family and wound up alone and embittered. When Poe visits Landor’s house and admires books that were clearly his daughter’s, we start to understand why the older man has softened around this misfit poet-cadet: The young man reminds him of his lost daughter. And Poe, who says he sometimes speaks to his dead mother, could use some paternal grounding.

This father-son dynamic powers the whole picture and sets up several key moments in the film’s climax. That, in turn, asks a lot of Melling, and you never quite know where he’s going with his wonderful Poe. Cavernous eyes dominating a face that’s otherwise all cheekbone and chin, he brings to this outsider a fey, haunted confidence. He alternates between swells of sadness and grandiosity, the mark of an honest-to-goodness Romantic. You feel the tragedy of his winding up at a place like West Point. (In real life, Poe lasted only a few months at the school.) You also sense, in his mannerisms and speech, that this is a man who will either make his mark on the world or end up dead in a ditch. (As it turned out, both sort of happened.)

On a purely narrative level, The Pale Blue Eye offers relatively standard developments: a hidden note here, an unnoticed wound there, an encrypted diary there. We’re dealing with a fundamentally cozy genre, however, and familiarity is allowed and encouraged. Plus Cooper understands that clichés handled with confidence can be effective. (This is, after all, the man who made Crazy Heart .) So he leans into them. A doomed character doesn’t just cough early on — they have a full-on seizure. Exposition is delivered with actorly aplomb. It helps that the supporting cast is comically stacked with performers who have carried entire movies: Timothy Spall plays the head of West Point; Toby Jones plays the school doctor; Gillian Anderson (!) plays the doctor’s emotionally fragile wife; Charlotte Gainsbourg (!!) plays a barmaid. Robert Duvall (!!!) plays a professor of the occult. (Is he the only American in the cast? Possibly.) There is at least one major miscasting among the younger actors, but to say more would constitute a spoiler.

Ultimately, it’s all pretty gripping, not just because of Bale and Melling and the heady atmosphere but because the crimes being investigated are savage on a downright existential level. The murders are monstrous enough to capture the imagination, and Cooper makes sure to prod us along by dwelling on the pasty, swollen corpses; the grotesque, coagulated wounds; the fingers stiff with rigor mortis being cracked on autopsy tables.

This also sets up a challenge for the movie: how to deliver a solution that not only makes sense but also honors the captivating cruelty of the crimes committed. And amazingly, the film’s finale is a genuine hoot — totally unexpected yet expertly sold through the clever deployment of information. Unlike a lot of mysteries that are designed to be unsolvable by an audience (which is a valid approach; remember, Arthur Conan Doyle never gave us all the necessary clues, either), The Pale Blue Eye shows us everything we need to figure it all out and still manages to pull the rug out from under us. Even so, what ultimately resonates are the picture’s surprisingly moving central relationship and its vivid setting.

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‘The Pale Blue Eye’ Review: Christian Bale and Edgar Allen Poe Catch a Killer in Sleepy, Hollow Mystery

David ehrlich.

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A serial killer saga that’s set along the frozen banks of the Hudson River during the winter of 1830, Scott Cooper ’s “ The Pale Blue Eye ” may be too frigid to thaw out the full potential of its premise, but this well-furnished Netflix whodunnit still has some fun tapping into the cleverest aspect of the Louis Bayard novel from which it’s been adapted: If a young Edgar Allen Poe were involved in solving a series of murders, it would only be a matter of time before everyone started to suspect that he was behind them.

Harry Melling ’s heroically weird performance as the death-obsessed poet has the potential to lull viewers into the same trap, even if it would seem that we should know better. Then again, most people don’t know anything about Poe’s brief stint at West Point, where his morbid nature and Southern lilt supposedly made him an irresistible target for some of his more abusive fellow cadets.

While it’s true that Poe is better remembered for inventing the modern detective story than he is for committing the perfect crime, “The Pale Blue Eye” finds him with both the motive to kill and the wit to get away with it. Furthermore, the vague parallels between these events and Poe’s own “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” can’t help but lend this movie a chilly whiff of “Shakespeare in Love” — one way or the other, it’s hard to dig up a new literary genre without getting your hands a little dirty in the process.

And yet, for all that preamble, Poe isn’t the protagonist of this story, nor even necessarily its tell-tale heart. That distinction would fall to Christian Bale ’s grieving alcoholic gumshoe, Augustus Landor, whose mind has grown foggy since the death of his wife and the subsequent disappearance of their teenage daughter — perhaps not as foggy as the raven-strewn roads that run along the river outside his house and steep this film in ghostly atmosphere, but it’s clear that Landor is a long way from Sherlock Holmes.

Unfortunately for Brevet Brigadier General Sylvanus Thayer (an underused Timothy Spall, all bluster and neck waddle), Landor is the only game in town, and someone needs to figure out who killed a cadet and removed their heart before Andrew Jackson shuts down West Point. Neither Poe nor Cooper are particularly convinced that shuttering the academy would be such a grave consequence — “The Pale Blue Eye” makes a few meek gestures towards the dehumanizing effects of militarizing young men — but the murder naturally tickles the young Poe’s imagination, and it isn’t long before the brilliant writer-to-be starts volunteering his services to the uncertain Landor.

The kind of movie where people keep muttering things like “dreadful business” in warmed over English accents and spend their nights watching pretty young things plunk out mediocre piano solos by candlelight — or, in Landor’s case, cozying up with a local barmaid played by Charlotte Gainsbourg — “The Pale Blue Eye” begins to double as a stiff but fanciful origin story for both Edgar Allen Poe and also the detective genre he would later help shape. The best stretches of Cooper’s thin and unhurried script find the film checking those two boxes at the same time, as its occult fascination enriches its all-too-human crimes (and vice-versa) until the border that separates this world from the next becomes as blurry as that which runs between reason and madness.

The Landor/Poe dynamic is too nuanced to be reduced to just logic vs. emotion, or left brain vs. right, but it’s fair to say that the sad drunk’s practicality makes him an intriguing partner for the squirrely poet’s imagination, especially once the latter falls lovesick over Lea Marquis ( Lucy Boynton ), the ailing daughter of West Point’s resident diagnostician (a dithering Toby Jones, who adds to a murder’s row of British character actors that also includes Simon McBurney and Gillian Anderson).

While Bale can only do so much to enliven a guarded character whose behavior isn’t fully legible until a second viewing that the first one may not be intriguing enough to entice, he and Melling eke some off-kilter fun out of a movie that, per Cooper’s usual M.O., seems determined to be as stolid as possible; the “Out of the Furnace” and “Hostiles” director has never been much for levity, though “The Pale Blue Eye” is refreshingly unpretentious when compared to his earlier work.

If only the mystery that Landor and Poe were determined to solve were as prickly or unsettled as their partnership. Fitting as it is that a proto-detective story should be so primitive, the lack of compelling suspects makes the case feel unworthy of its characters, and neither a rising body count nor a wild cameo from Robert Duvall (playing a weirdo phrenologist named Jean-Pépé!) is enough to keep “The Pale Blue Eye” from losing sight of its own strengths for long stretches of time. There’s pathos aplenty under the surface, but the film’s mystery is structured in a way that doesn’t reveal the sly distortions of faith that have been hiding beneath the Hudson until it’s too late to appreciate them.

“Men will do anything to cheat death,” Gainsbourg’s character observes at one point, but shall its weight ever be lifted from our dear Mr. Landor? “Nevermore” would’ve been a more satisfying answer than what “Poe: First Class” leaves us with here, if only because the poet would have to live another 15 years before he understood what all of the ravens were trying to tell him.

Netflix will release “The Pale Blue Eye” in select theaters on Friday, December 23. It will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, January 6.

The Pale Blue Eye review: Christian Bale chases down a chilly murder mystery

Bale's flinty Victorian detective finds his odd-couple match in Harry Melling as a young Edgar Allan Poe, even if this atmospheric thriller can't stick the landing.

Has Christian Bale ever met a dark horse he couldn't sell? Filmmaker Scott Cooper and his actor muse have now made three movies together over the last decade, all variations on a theme (or two themes, really: blood vengeance and tortured masculinity). The Pale Blue Eye , which follows their contemporary Rust Belt noir Out of the Furnace and 2017's brutal frontier epic Hostiles , has all the signposts of another Cooper-Bale special: bruised knuckles and battered psyches, death without mercy and even less levity.

The parched and wintry Pale (in theaters this Friday and on Netflix Jan. 6) duly delivers all that, with frostbite. The cinematography is grimly gorgeous and the austere, brooding atmosphere threaded with old-timey dread. But it also has a bright skein of offbeat whimsy running through it, thanks in part to a delightfully unbound performance by Harry Melling ( The Old Guard ), who nearly turns the movie into a weird and tender buddy comedy with Bale, before it all surrenders to deep-purple melodrama in the last act.

To be fair, purple is pretty much the baseline for a film in which young men keep turning up ritualistically dead — particularly when one of their peers, played by Melling, is the Godfather of Goth himself, Edgar Allan Poe. His Poe doesn't yet look capable of growing a mustache when we first meet him as a young cadet at circa-1830s West Point, a cheerful outcast with a flutey Southern drawl and seemingly no natural aptitude for military life. Edgar isn't a direct witness when a classmate is discovered hanging from a tree one cold morning with his heart surgically removed from his chest, but he has a lot of fanciful theories he's eager to share with Bale's Augustus Landor, the veteran detective summoned from New York City to investigate.

Augustus, beardy and taciturn in a top hat, is a man of science, not poetry. He's also a widower who's lost his daughter, prone to taking in a pint or three of whiskey the local ale house when he's not enjoying the occasional company of a sympathetic barmaid (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Bonded by intrigue and alcohol, Augustus and Edward begin to form a tentative partnership, or at least a sort of unofficial crime club. When more bodies appear on campus, similarly stripped of crucial organs, the case becomes serial — and a growing embarrassment for the authorities, including the irritated colonel in charge (Timothy Spall) and the anxious local surgeon, Dr. Daniel Marquis ( Toby Jones ).

Marquis and his eccentric wife ( Gillian Anderson , vibrating on high) happen to be the parents of one of the most admired students on campus, a swaggering golden boy named Artemus (Harry Lawtey); they also have a delicate, doll-like daughter, Lea ( Bohemian Rhapsody 's Lucy Boynton ) whose charms are not lost on Artemus' peers, including young Edgar. (She in turn is beguiled, improbably, by Poe's sensitivity and sense of the macabre: "How well it sits on you, morbidity," Lea tells him admiringly, which apparently passed for flirting in the 19th century).

Cooper, working from the bestselling 2003 novel of the same name by Louis Bayard, builds a solid murder mystery out of Victorian scheming and icebox ambience (rarely has an entire cast looked so genuinely in need of heating pads). Until he loses his way in the cascading absurdity of the final twists, the movie is mostly a study in how good its two main actors can be: Melling's Poe, wearing his tell-tale heart on his sleeve, seems to melt something in Bale, whose dour detective becomes almost playful in his presence. A lesser actor might easily have mined Landor strictly for his shades of gray, the tragic-misanthrope cliché; this one simply lives him from the inside out. Bale's conviction, and his odd-couple chemistry with Melling, isn't quite enough to sell The Pale Blue Eye 's loopy improbabilities in the end, but it's still a pleasure to watch them try. Grade: B

Netflix’s Christian Bale horror mystery The Pale Blue Eye is at its best when it gets pulpy

Antlers director Scott Cooper and Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursley help spice up a story co-starring Edgar Allan Poe

Christian Bale, sporting a great big bushy beard as 1830s detective August Landor, stands by a fireplace with a mantel crowded with bric-a-brac in The Pale Blue Eye

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Share All sharing options for: Netflix’s Christian Bale horror mystery The Pale Blue Eye is at its best when it gets pulpy

Scott Cooper’s films technically occupy a variety of genres, but they tend to feel similar because they’re so often pulp stories teetering on the verge of tragedy, and sometimes toppling into it. The 2021 horror film Antlers , the 2015 gangster picture Black Mass , and the 2013 family crime drama Out of the Furnace might all have better reputations if they were either a little more fun, or a little less. Their serious yet workmanlike approach to genre-friendly material makes Cooper’s new Netflix film The Pale Blue Eye an immediate candidate for his best work, because it applies that same workmanlike seriousness to a premise that’s shamelessly pulpy: In 1830, a young (and fictionalized) Edgar Allan Poe helps a detective solve a murder mystery at the United States Military Academy in West Point.

This is not a prequel to The Raven , the 2012 John Cusack film that also paired a fictional Poe with a detective in order to solve a series of murders. Cooper is adapting an appropriately Edgar-nominated novel by Louis Bayard, and he doesn’t take the story into a winking, silly direction. Instead, he casts his frequent collaborator, professional sourpuss Christian Bale, as lonely detective August Landor, who’s summoned to West Point to investigate a disturbing mutilation following an apparent suicide; a body initially found hanging from a tree later had its heart removed by unknown parties. Landor quickly points out that it’s clearly a murder case, and agrees to find the killer. Early in his investigation, he receives a bit of advice from a young cadet named Poe (played by the Harry Potter films’ Harry Melling): “The man you’re looking for is a poet.”

Poe, of course, knows poetry. His interest in literature is just one element contributing to his outcast status at West Point, and he recognizes the symbolic nature of removing the heart after death. In Landor, he finds a quietly kindred spirit: When he sees the detective’s well-stocked bookshelves, he’s in ecstasy. Melling — who played Harry Potter antagonist Dudley Dursley before taking on roles in projects like The Queen’s Gambit and Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth — really does resemble photos of Poe. While his Virginian accent is a little cartoony, in the usual manner of English actors playing American, it works as part of his whole weirdo presentation.

1830s detective August Landor (Christian Bale) grimaces at a book in a candle-filled West Point military academy library as cadet Edgar Allen Poe (Harry Melling) looks on in The Pale Blue Eye

Melling plays Poe as a showoff who may be a bit too shy and self-aware to have found an enthusiastic audience. Bale, for his part, lets his natural intensity recede enough that Landor becomes that audience. Their odd-couple team-up develops an understated tenderness amid all the ghoulish elements that call back to Poe’s stories and poems: removed hearts, coded messages, and Poe pining over a sickly woman (Lucy Boynton).

The rest of the cast is stacked: Melling’s Harry Potter co-stars Toby Jones and Timothy Spall, along with Simon McBurney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The X-Files ’ Gillian Anderson, and in a tiny part, Robert Duvall. All the big names provide more color than truly memorable scenes, though: In some cases, they’re mere accessories to their characters’ elaborate beards and hats. (This is a terrific beards-and-hats picture.) With so many distinguished older performers afoot, it can be hard to tell the younger, less weathered cadets apart, which diminishes the movie’s already sparse lineup of suspects. Will Poe himself later become a suspect, even though the audience will not for a minute believe that he’s guilty? Naturally. This is not a movie that flouts murder mystery traditions, which the real Poe helped establish.

Still, the slightly underwhelming mystery plotting and general crime-novel luridness don’t limit The Pale Blue Eye as much as they should, because of the engaging lead characters and the wintry landscape they inhabit. Dabbling in rural horror again, Cooper pulls back from Antlers ’ viscerally damp rot. The snow of not-quite-upstate New York looks pristine in the film’s black-white-blue color palette. The atmosphere isn’t full Poe-style gothic, but there are gorgeously moody touches, like a conversation staged with two characters turned almost completely into silhouettes against the moonlight — living shadow puppets in the woods.

At times, the focus on a remote-looking outpost in a beautiful landscape, as well as the mystery death under investigation, make the movie resemble a winter Western as much as a horror-tinged thriller. Either way, it’s the rare January movie that feels seasonally appropriate for the chilly post-holiday blues — a movie meant to be watched while cozying up by a fire, whether your fireplace is figurative or literal.

Gillian Anderson in an incredibly bulky brocade wrap and bonnet and Toby Jones in a top hat and suit stand in the snow as Julia and Dr. Marquis in The Pale Blue Eye

Cooper still has a little trouble luxuriating in the mood he generates. Though it’s not fair to expect a full Tim Burton work-up of this material , The Pale Blue Eye doesn’t capture the twinges of madness that inform some of Poe’s most famous stories, the way some of his narrators draw the readers into their destructive obsessions. In this movie, Poe is more of a romantic Sherlock Holmes figure: the eccentric, misunderstood genius capable of examining the world as a beautiful puzzle box.

The movie doesn’t have much use for the most meta dimension to the story: the fact that the real Poe helped invent modern detective fiction. (Granted, leaning too hard on that idea could have been insufferable.) Cooper and Bale seem more comfortable with Landor’s brand of melancholy, informed by the absence of his wife and daughter, as well as some of the odd, unexpected pauses Bale takes in some of his line deliveries. At times, the movie feels like it’s having fun in spite of itself. So it’s perfect, in a way, that Edgar Allan Poe keeps turning up to jolt his own story back to life.

The Pale Blue Eye is streaming on Netflix now.

Review: A striking look elevates Christian Bale murder-mystery ‘The Pale Blue Eye’

A man with a beard and mustache holds a light in the movie "The Pale Blue Eye."

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What “The Pale Blue Eye,” a gothic mystery-thriller adapted by director Scott Cooper from Louis Bayard’s 2006 novel, may lack in fully propulsive storytelling and consistent narrative focus is more than made up for by its handsome physical production and gorgeous camerawork. For its visual appeal alone it’s worth a theatrical visit ahead of its Netflix premiere next month.

Cooper is a vivid, intense, deliberate filmmaker, as evidenced by such past films as “Crazy Heart,” “Out of the Furnace” and “Hostiles.” He doesn’t make it easy on viewers as he works to envelop them in dark, often harsh environments and a gallery of haunted, deeply lived-in characters. From his arguably best picture, the 2015 gangster drama “Black Mass” (sorry, “Crazy Heart” fans), to perhaps his least successful, the grim 2021 genre pic “Antlers,” Cooper is an actor’s director whose performers’ efforts tend to eclipse the material at hand. Cooper’s prior experience as an actor (“Gods and Generals,” “Get Low,”) has served him and his casts especially well.

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Such is the case once again in the 1830-set “The Pale Blue Eye,” which reunites Cooper for the third time, after “Furnace” and “Hostiles,” with the fearlessly talented Christian Bale . An acting chameleon, who most recently made a meal of his Pacino-inflected, one-eyed surgeon in David O. Russell’s period curio “Amsterdam,” Bale stars as Augustus Landor, a widowed, retired New York City constable brought on to investigate the apparent suicide of a West Point cadet named Fry (Steven Maier).

Given that it’s still the early years of the now-famed military academy, the powers that be — Col. Sylvanus Thayer (Timothy Spall), the school’s first superintendent, and his second-in-command, Capt. Ethan Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) — want Augustus to solve the case quickly and discreetly to preserve West Point’s burgeoning reputation.

But speed is off the table when Augustus learns that the victim’s heart was proficiently removed from his chest and that the “suicide” was a homicide. The local medical examiner, Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), seems a bit elusive (or is it sinister?) when dealing with Augustus on the case. But then again, so do others around West Point, including such cadets as Dr. Marquis’ charismatic and ambitious son, Artemus (Harry Lawtey), and volatile bully Randy Ballinger (Fred Hechinger).

There is one cadet, though, who seems inclined to help Augustus, and he’s a bit different, daresay more eccentric, than his classmates. Oh, and his name is Edgar Allan Poe — yes, that one. (Poe did, in fact, attend West Point for seven months around that time, although no known killings took place.) Something of an outcast and a rebel compared to his more dutiful fellow cadets, aspiring poet Poe (Harry Melling of “The Queen’s Gambit”) is drawn to the darker facets of the crime and offers a window into the cadet world for Augustus.

Poe’s florid speech and arch manner, along with a witty and perceptive persona, help foretell the iconic writer he would become. It serves as a kind of What-if? Poe origin story and one of the film’s more compelling aspects. (It’s no coincidence that one of Poe’s most famous short stories is called “The Tell-Tale Heart” and features a victim with “a pale blue eye.”)

But a second cadet killing with a less, uh, “efficient” heart removal, sends Augustus and Poe in new directions that introduce us more deeply to Dr. Marquis’ offbeat family, which includes his erratic wife, Julia (an over-the-top Gillian Anderson), and lovely, musical daughter, Lea (Lucy Boynton), who’s plagued by epileptic seizures. Suffice to say, things get pretty strange.

As many intriguing parts as there are to the eerie tale, they’re blunted by the film’s overly measured pace and a split in narrative point of view: Is this ultimately Augustus’ story or Poe’s, especially as Poe falls for Lea and an unlikely — and rather quick — alliance is formed.

Augustus’ alcoholism, his wife’s death, a missing daughter and his warm relationship with a town barmaid (Charlotte Gainsbourg) also factor in to varying degrees.

Still, a late-breaking, didn’t-see-it-coming twist redeems some of the script’s less effective elements.

Robert Duvall, now 91, shows up in a small but welcome role as a phrenologist (one who studies skulls) and occult expert who offers Augustus and Poe possible insight into the bizarre killings. Kudos to the picture’s hair and makeup designers who did ace work on the venerable actor (the desired look was reportedly that of Russian author Leo Tolstoy) — and on the rest of the cast as well. Excellent costume and production design too.

But the cinematography by frequent Cooper collaborator Masanobu Takayanagi is the real secret weapon here as it captures, in picture-postcard perfection, upstate New York’s wintry, ice-blue starkness (western Pennsylvania subbed for the Hudson Valley), often set against the warm blue of the cadets’ uniforms; frames appear almost monochrome with painterly blotches of color. The burnished, candlelit glow of an array of interior locations is also strikingly shot. And that “ice house” scene — wow.

'The Pale Blue Eye'

Rated: R, for some violent content and bloody images Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 23, Landmark Westwood; Los Feliz 3; Bay Theater, Pacific Palisades; available Jan. 6 on Netflix

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‘The Pale Blue Eye’: Christian Bale and Edgar Allan Poe Solve Murders on Netflix

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

It’s 1830 on the snowy New York campus of the United States Military Academy and a young cadet has been found hanged. The coroner and others will eventually discover that the man’s heart has been stolen from his chest and a portion of a note, yet to be deciphered, has been hidden away, clutched in the dead man’s hardened grip. Not to worry: Christian Bale is on the case. The Pale Blue Eye stars Bale as Detective Augustus Landor, the kind of guy whose reputation (a dead wife, a missing daughter, alcoholism and great detective skills) precedes him like a stench. That means he’s perfect for the job: he has no one and nothing to lose. And he’s seen enough death, one presumes, that the spookiness of this endeavor, wherein the body count is sure to increase, probably won’t get to him.

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Which makes Bale a necessary counterpoint. He’s got the pain, but not the extremeness, at least not in this role. His wayward detective isn’t committed enough for this to be a job that gets him out of his slump, gives him a chance to redeem himself. This movie isn’t about that. He isn’t the detective as savior, nor is he really a man in need of saving, not exactly. Bale is somehow too even-keeled to dip firmly into an archetype. He approaches the role the way that Landor appears, at first, to approach this crime: Like a man on the job, maybe not much more. Being a genuine movie star, the kind of actor who’s worth watching even when the movie isn’t, Bale can do that and get away with it. What saves The Pale Blue Eye from itself is that it knows as much.

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‘The Pale Blue Eye' Review: Christian Bale and Henry Melling Get at the Tell-Tale Heart of an Edgar Allan Poe Mystery

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Based on Louis Bayard ’s critically acclaimed novel by the same name, Scott Cooper ’s The Pale Blue Eye narrows in on a brief window of time when the literary great Edgar Allan Poe was a student at West Point Military Academy. While the film is a work of fiction, it presents a rather intriguing and believable interpretation of Poe, that neatly incorporates allusions to his later poems and short stories.

Set in 1830, The Pale Blue Eye sees the military academy thrown into turmoil when the body of Cadet Leroy Fry ( Matt Heim ) is found hanging from a tree with his heart cut out of his chest. The shocking violence of the attack leads the local authorities to call in former New York constable Augustus Landor ( Christian Bale ) to investigate the case, hoping to catch the murderer before one victim becomes many. Requiring someone who knows the comings and goings of the cadets that were close to Fry, Landor enlists Poe ( Harry Melling ) to gather information.

As the unlikely duo begins to unravel the mystery, they quickly discover that there is far more than meets ( The Pale Blue ) eye at play. Given the nature of Fry’s murder, things begin to point in the direction of the occult. This line of investigation takes them to the doorsteps of Artemus Marquis ( Harry Lawtey ), whose father happens to be West Point’s resident surgeon, Dr. Daniel Marquis ( Toby Jones ), and whose sister, Lea ( Lucy Boynton ) happens to have caught Poe’s eye. Lea is a sickly thing, which causes her father and mother Julia ( Gillian Anderson ) to fret over her constantly, but it doesn’t stop Artemus’ friends from pining after her either. She doesn’t even bat an eye at Poe’s insistence on taking a walk with her through a graveyard, in the midst of increasing concerns about there being a killer on the loose.

RELATED: 'The Pale Blue Eye' Gets Haunting New Character Posters [Exclusive]

Melling, who is perhaps best known for playing Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter franchise, bares no resemblance to that character as he brings to life Poe’s meek, mild-tempered southern gentleman persona. He is exactly what one might expect for a melancholic author who would go on to pen such haunting tales as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and rise to prominence as someone who dabbles in the odd and macabre. Melling pairs well with Bale, who plays Landor as a man who uses gruff, standoffishness to mask a hidden darkness. In a lot of ways, Poe and Landor are both outsiders—but their seclusion is born out of very different circumstances. As their friendship grows, so too do the secrets being kept between them.

Clocking in at around two hours, The Pale Blue Eye can drag at certain points, which the plot actually demands. It is a slow-moving mystery that leads its audience down narrow alleyways that present only dead ends and more death. Its false starts are like the stuttering beat of a dying heart, coming to an anticipated end—only to jolt back to life with the truth. Whenever you feel confident that you’ve come to a conclusion about who the murderer is and who is dabbling in the occult, the script quickly pulls the rug out from under you. It’s a fun styling for diehard sleuths, but the eleventh-hour reveal might be frustrating for armchair detectives. Once the Pale Blue Eye reaches the precipice, and the truth is uncovered, it won’t soon be forgotten. The motives behind the madness may even feel justified, painting the first hour and a half of the film in an entirely new light.

The film’s cinematography is another highlight, with Masanobu Takayanagi reuniting with Cooper (and Bale) after working with the duo on Out of the Furnace and Hostiles , as well as Black Mass . Takayanagi’s cinematic framing further builds on the somber and haunted atmosphere that Cooper’s direction and screenplay capitalize on. The Pale Blue Eye fully brings to life the essence of Poe’s most dreary works, while folding in a fictionalized interpretation of the author’s potential heroism. Set to the score of Howard Shore , it’s hard to go wrong with the package that Cooper has pulled together.

Ultimately, The Pale Blue Eye is a gothic tale that positions Poe as the damsel in distress, opposite Bale, who embodies the archetype of the burdened and brooding male protagonist. It follows the anticipated beats, trying to lull the audience into a false sense of security, before revealing the true architect behind the tale's gruesome murders. It may be Cooper’s best historical film, and perhaps that’s because there’s a distinct melancholy to it that is etched into the bones of Virginia’s finest—just like Poe.

The Pale Blue Eye comes to theaters on December 23, 2022, and will be available to stream through Netflix on January 6, 2023.

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The Pale Blue Eye review: an unpredictable gothic thriller

Christian Bale stands near a river in The Pale Blue Eye.

“Director Scott Cooper's The Pale Blue Eye is a fun, atmospheric gothic thriller that falls well short of greatness but still features two standout lead performances from Harry Melling and Christian Bale.”

Harry Melling's scene-stealing performance as Edgar Allan Poe
Christian Bale's layered lead performance
Masanobu Takayanagi's rich, gothic cinematography
A meandering second act
A disappointingly absurd third-act climax
An uneven tone throughout

The Pale Blue Eye is a visually rich, intentionally tricky gothic thriller. It’s the closest director Scott Cooper has ever come to making a purely straightforward piece of genre entertainment, though the film does occasionally veer into the same overwrought, melodramatic territory that so many of Cooper’s previous films have inhabited. While it doesn’t linger quite as long on its brutality or violence as 2017’s Hostiles or 2013’s Out of the Furnace , either, The Pale Blue Eye is still weighed down by the ideas about masculinity that have been at the heart of every single one of Cooper’s directorial efforts.

That said, there’s a sense of playfulness present in The Pale Blue Eye that helps separate it from Cooper’s prior explorations of American tragedy. Most of that lightheartedness comes from Harry Melling’s big, go-for-broke central performance, which only further cements him as one of Hollywood’s more versatile working actors. Although Cooper frequently struggles to marry the jovial, irreverent nature of The Pale Blue Eye ’s story with his own filmmaking sensibilities, the resulting film still emerges as a curiously endearing gothic adventure.

The Pale Blue Eye ’s winking love for the macabre is evident in its opening shot, which slowly peels away several layers of fog to reveal the crooked silhouette of a dead man hanging from the branches of a bare tree. From there, the film, which is based on Louis Bayard’s 2003 novel of the same name, follows Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), a prickly private detective, as he is hired by a pair of West Point officials to look into said hanged man’s suspected murder. Along the way, Landor recruits the help of none other than Edgar Allan Poe (Melling), introduced as a young West Point cadet in The Pale Blue Eye , to help him unearth the truth of the film’s inciting death.

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Before long, Landor and Poe find themselves investigating not just one death, but several, all of which quickly cause fear to spread throughout The Pale Blue Eye ’s central, secluded version of 1830s New York. In true Edgar Allan Poe fashion, The Pale Blue Eye also combines its macabre detective story with a gothic love story that brings Melling’s Poe face to face with the beautiful but sickly Lea Marquis (Lucy Boynton). Poe’s relationship with Lea, along with Landor’s lingering grief over the public disappearance of his daughter, Mattie (Hadley Robinson), inevitably end up impacting both men in ways neither truly see coming.

What emerges as the real emotional core of The Pale Blue Eye isn’t Poe’s romance with Lea, but the father-son bond that slowly but surely develops between Melling’s boisterous poet and Bale’s mournful detective. Together, Bale and Melling make for a compelling, watchable pair. Bale, for his part, brings the same kind of gruffness and cynicism to his performance as Landor that he has in both of his previous films with Cooper. Fortunately, those qualities work well within the private eye mold that Augustus Landor is carved from. The Pale Blue Eye ’s twisty final third also reveals layers to Bale’s performance that have the potential to make revisiting the film an even more rewarding experience than a first-time viewing provides.

Harry Melling, meanwhile, steals the show in The Pale Blue Eye as the film’s young, rebellious Edgar Allan Poe. Here, Melling is allowed to reenvision one of America’s most influential writers not just as a young man obsessed with death and the macabre, but also as a hopeless romantic who is just as eager to read aloud one of his original poems as he is to decode incomplete notes and hidden codes. Cooper, to his credit, effectively uses the juxtaposition of Melling’s lively energy and Bale’s somber performance to further highlight the subtleties of both stars’ performances.

Unfortunately, none of the other performances in The Pale Blue Eye work as well as Melling’s and Bale’s do. Despite featuring a murderers’ row of Hollywood character actors, including Timothy Spall, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, and Simon McBurney, many of The Pale Blue Eye ’s supporting players either fail to match the tone and energy of Cooper’s script or are left stranded playing underwritten characters. The latter criticism is particularly true of Boynton’s Lea and Robert Duvall’s Jean-Pepe, both of whom aren’t explored deeply enough to become the interesting figures they could have been.

Cooper also struggles at times to nail down The Pale Blue Eye ’s unwieldy tone. Outside of a few scenes featuring a ridiculously over-the-top performance from Gillian Anderson, the first two-thirds of The Pale Blue Eye cruise by fairly evenly. It’s in the film’s fiery third act, however, that Cooper seems to lose total tonal control over it. During one specific climactic set piece, Cooper attempts to ride the line between serious terror and gothic camp but fails to bring enough of either to the scene, which strands the sequence in an awkward tonal gray zone that never totally works.

Cooper does manage to partially recover from his third-act mistakes in The Pale Blue Eye ’s game-changing final scenes, which paint the events of the film in an interesting new light. Bale and Melling’s lead performances similarly provide The Pale Blue Eye with a cohesive quality that helps smooth over some of the ripples caused by its tonal inconsistencies. Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi also creates an invitingly moody aesthetic that emphasizes every bank of snow and dark shadowy corner that appears throughout the film — imbuing it with a richness and visual density that its script may not match, but which nonetheless helps reinforce The Pale Blue Eye ’s status as a satisfying, lightweight gothic thriller.

The Pale Blue Eye premieres Friday, January 6 on Netflix.

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DVD & Streaming

The Pale Blue Eye

Crime , Drama , Horror

Content Caution

A man in 1830, surrounded by cadets, looks up with a grim expression on his face.

In Theaters

Christian Bale as Augustus Landor; Harry Melling as Cadet Edgar Allan Poe; Simon McBurney as Captain Hitchcock; Timothy Spall as Superintendent Thayer; Toby Jones as Dr. Daniel Marquis; Harry Lawtey as Cadet Artemus Marquis; Fred Hechinger as Cadet Randolph Ballinger; Joey Brooks as Cadet Stoddard; Charlotte Gainsbourg as Patsy; Lucy Boynton as Lea Marquis; Robert Duvall as Jean Pépé; Gillian Anderson as Julia Marquis; Steven Maier as Cadet Fry; Brennan Keel Cook as Cadet Huntoon; Hadley Robinson as Mattie

Home Release Date

January 6, 2023
Scott Cooper

Distributor

Movie review.

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?

This question, posed by author Edgar Allan Poe, is examined when the dead body of a cadet attending the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1830 is discovered.

The circumstances of his death aren’t suspicious to the school’s officers. He died by hanging, seemingly self-induced—which was not uncommon due to the harsh regulations imposed upon the cadets.

However, when the cadet’s corpse is found sans heart the following day, the instructors are shocked.

Who could commit such an evil and, ahem, heartless act?

They call upon Augustus Landor to solve the mystery. A retired New York City constable, Landor made a name for himself breaking up gangs, apprehending their leaders and solving grisly murders. His use of modern forensics, codebreaking and “gloveless interrogation” make him well-suited to ferret out the guilty party.

Landor secretly employs a young cadet and poet—none other than Edgar A. Poe himself—to help him in his investigation. But as Landor and Poe begin to piece the clues together, more deaths occur. And they learn there’s much more than murder afoot at West Point.

Positive Elements

Spiritual elements.

Poe says early on that his mother (who has been dead for 20 years) speaks to him frequently. We later hear that a young woman reports communing with her dead relatives, too. Landor also seems to see someone who isn’t there, but it turns out to just be a delusion.

Though Poe quotes Psalm 51:10 and says he enjoys talking about God and death, it’s evident that faith is not important to him. Rather, he just finds the topic fascinating.

Church and prayer service attendance is mandatory for cadets. We see a woman praying before a portrait of Christ. The Bible is read by a priest at a funeral service.

Landor and Poe quickly deduce that the killer might be involved in the occult, since the heart is used in those practices. Landor confirms this theory when he discovers a ritual site. A passage mentioning “evil angels” and witches’ “Sabbath feast” is read from a book written by a “witch-hunter.” And it’s rumored that another occult book contains instructions for attaining immortality.

[ Spoiler Warning ] That book is later discovered in the hands of the witch-hunter’s descendants. The family attempts to perform the immortality ceremony (which requires lots of blood, chanting in Latin and a human heart) to heal his great-great-granddaughter of her seizures.

We hear that Landor was a minister’s son, but he admits he hasn’t “darkened the door” of a church in a long time.

Sexual Content

Landor frequents the bed of Patsy, a local barmaid. We see them lying in bed together (Landor shirtless in one scene). A prostitute us referenced. Poe recites a poem that mentions nudity and sex.

Violent Content

We see the mangled corpses of two cadets, both hanging from nooses. The first man, Fry, is assumed to have died by suicide. However, his body is later found cut open with his heart missing. Upon further examination (which we witness), it’s discovered he suffered blunt force trauma to the back of his head prior to the hanging, evidence that reveals he was murdered. The second man is found with his heart already removed, leaving no question that his death was a homicide. (It’s also revealed he was castrated.) Later scenes show these two crimes being committed by the perpetrator, and both men are beaten badly before they are killed.

A young man and woman are crushed to death by falling ceiling beams during a fire. A man is partially drained of his blood and nearly has his heart surgically removed for an occult ceremony. We see the bodies of a cow and sheep (both missing their hearts) pinned to a tree.

We hear that a woman’s illness killed her slowly and painfully. Another woman experiences a seizure; she falls to the ground, unable to breathe during the episode (which we learn that she has frequently).

During an autopsy, Landor snaps open stiff fingers that have undergone rigor mortis in order to retrieve a note stuck in the dead man’s hand. (The chest cavity is also pulled open during the examination of the body, and we see bruises on the neck from hanging.)

Poe get tackled, beaten and nearly killed by a fellow cadet before Landor stops the attack. Later, Poe threatens to kill the young man if they ever “cross swords” again. We hear this isn’t the first scuffle Poe has been in with another cadet. And Poe admits that if he were to actually kill every person who had abused him at the Academy, the Corps of Cadets would number fewer than a dozen.

Two men fight, one of whom has a knife. They are stopped when falling ceiling beams, caused by a fire, distract them. The unarmed man saves two people from the flames while the armed man is killed.

Poe reads a book that says witches eat “hearts of unbaptized children” and “hearts of hanged men.” We hear a man was burned at the stake.

A woman slams a plate down, breaking it.

[ Spoiler Warning ] A young woman is raped by three men (we see the beginning of the attack but not the actual act). She returns home bleeding with a torn dress. Later, she ends her life by jumping off a cliff.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear three uses of the f-word and one of “b–tard.” Christ’s name is abused once, and God’s name is abused six times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Landor is instructed not to drink during his investigation (because he has the reputation of being a drunkard), but he imbibes anyways. We see people drinking at a bar. Many casually sip wine and liquor with meals.

A man is unknowingly drugged.

Other Negative Elements

We learn that Poe has been bullied by other cadets since his arrival because of his physical appearance and odd mannerisms. Others believe the Academy goes too far in its regulations, making the men who attend less human and less reasonable. And some of those affiliated with the Academy question its practices, since those regulations have produced suicides and ritual murders.

When a man justifies the people he’s killed, his friend states that it wasn’t the right thing to do. But instead of turning him in, the friend burns the evidence of his wrongdoing.

We hear that Landor lost his wife to illness and that his daughter recently ran off.

Characters lie. Landor snoops through people’s personal belongings and homes without permission. Cadets gamble and break curfew. Despite serving in the military, Poe demonstrates an unpatriotic attitude. A woman tries to manipulate her paramour using love as an excuse.

Death is a natural part of life. We all face it eventually. Some, perhaps, more spectacularly than others—especially if you happen to be a character in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s works.

The Pale Blue Eye isn’t based on any of Poe’s poems or short stories, though some of the characters here got their names from his tales, and the film’s title and theme borrow from “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But it still seems to follow that pattern.

Based on the book of the same name by Louis Bayard, the story is fictional. And it explores a theme repeatedly brought up in Poe’s works: death and the ability of man to bring it about.

As such, it’s a brutal film to watch. Men are savagely murdered. A young woman is raped. We witness a suicide. Occultists seek immortality through ceremonial mutilation of the dead.

And there’s no absolution found. Justice is served unjustly. Guilty parties walk free. And characters remain tortured by their own inner demons.

If you’ve read any of Edgar Allan Poe, this won’t surprise you. But The Pale Blue Eye might still prove too macabre even for the most seasoned student of Poe’s works.

Emily Tsiao

Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.

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clock This article was published more than 1 year ago

‘The Pale Blue Eye’: A 19th-century whodunit — with Edgar Allan Poe

Christian Bale, as an ex-cop looking for a killer, headlines this murder mystery, but Harry Melling steals the show as his sidekick Edgar Allan Poe

Writer-director Scott Cooper may be as perfect an interpreter as can be imagined for Netflix’s pulpy yet high-minded adaptation of “The Pale Blue Eye,” a well-received 2003 whodunit by novelist Louis Bayard about a series of grisly 1830 murders investigated by a retired police detective and his young assistant, Edgar Allan Poe. Coming off 2021’s “Antlers” — Cooper’s folk-horror tale adapted from a Nick Antosca short story about monsters, real and imagined — “Blue Eye” feels like the ideal chaser: a stylish and smart telling of what is at heart macabre malarkey.

The true story of how Edgar Allen Poe blew his promising military career.

Speaking of heart, the film gets straight down to business with the discovery of a corpse, minus that critical organ, on the campus of the U.S. Military Academy, where some might recall the real Poe was a cadet during the year in question. When the school’s brass recruit a local legend in law enforcement to look into the crime — the brooding, damaged ex-cop Augustus “Gus” Landor — Gus almost immediately gains the assistance of Edgar, a West Point student who shares the older man’s capacity for alcohol, predilection for melancholy and fascination with criminal psychology. Played, respectively, by Christian Bale and Harry Melling, the two sleuths — a kind of American Holmes and Watson — are soon on the case, as other victims, animal and human, turn up with their hearts cut out.

Both actors are enormous fun to watch, for very different reasons. Bale, who previously worked with Cooper in “ Out of the Furnace ” and “ Hostiles ,” brings a methodical intensity to the character of Gus, who is plagued by demons, as movie detectives so often are. Edgar, on the other hand, is a morbid poet, albeit one whom Melling endows with an air that is both louche and impish. Melling’s scenery-chewing portrayal of the budding writer — and, here, amateur gumshoe — is one of the film’s chief delights. Aided by a wig and makeup, Melling also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the writer, through his portrayal avoids cliche.

In supporting roles, Toby Jones, Timothy Spall, Gillian Anderson, Charlotte Gainsbourg and an almost unrecognizable Robert Duvall, playing an expert in the occult, are all reliably entertaining.

But there is at times a sense to the film that you are watching an overdressed B-movie, especially as the plot veers more deeply into the territory of the supernatural — or at least as the workings of the world are imagined by some of the story’s more credulous characters. It has the whiff of a Poe story: unknowable and mysterious. Filtered through Bayard’s modern lens, it nevertheless retains an admirable residue of 19th-century flavor.

Where “The Pale Blue Eye” succeeds best is in the way it shows how Edgar — yet to become the writer of ghoulish, moody atmosphere and delicious morbidity we remember — got some of his enduring ideas about the coexistence of depravity and beauty. The movie only stumbles when it succumbs, here and there, to the more trivial tropes and jump scares of the contemporary thriller.

R. At Landmark’s Atlantic Plumbing Cinema; also available on Netflix. Contains some violence, including rape, bloody images, brief strong language and mature thematic elements. 130 minutes.

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The pale blue eye, common sense media reviewers.

Gore and death in effective period detective story.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Overall, not much positivity in this story. Main t

For various reasons, Landor can't be considered a

Set at West Point in 1830, a time when the school

A woman is assaulted by three men; rape is mention

Two characters shown lying in bed together, comfor

Two uses of "f--k." Exclamatory use of "Christ alm

Frequent scenes of drinking beers in pubs. Additio

Positive Messages

Overall, not much positivity in this story. Main thrust is revenge, specifically revenge against sexual violence. Also some anti-military commentary -- i.e., the argument that service takes away a person's humanity.

Positive Role Models

For various reasons, Landor can't be considered a role model. Poe is a free-thinker who's intelligent and talented, and he seems excited to be able to use his talents to get to solve the murders. But he does lie in some sequences to get information he needs.

Diverse Representations

Set at West Point in 1830, a time when the school was segregated and only White cadets were allowed to attend, so White men have all the power here. Of three major female characters, one is a wife, one is a barmaid/love interest, and one is a conventionally attractive "wild card." None of the three has much agency, if any.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

A woman is assaulted by three men; rape is mentioned. A character dies by suicide (jumps from high cliff). Characters are killed, beaten, bloodied. Bleeding wrists, blood dripping into bowl, blood spread on floor. Bloody face. Human heart used in ritual. Gory corpse. Dead bodies hanging from tree. Building on fire, collapsing beams landing on characters. Snapping corpse's fingers. Dead sheep hung from tree; some blood seen. One character attacks another; struggling, fighting, threatening with rock. Fighting, punching. Threatening with knife. Violent dialogue, describing hearts carved from cadavers, animals carved up, castration, etc. A person has a seizure. Brief bullying. Visit from a ghost.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two characters shown lying in bed together, comfortable and intimate. A character recites a lewd, sex-related poem.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Two uses of "f--k." Exclamatory use of "Christ almighty" and "my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Frequent scenes of drinking beers in pubs. Additional social drinking, characters doing shots of liquor, etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Pale Blue Eye is a moody murder mystery set in 1830 at the West Point Military Academy. Based on the novel by Louis Bayard, it teams fictional detective Augustus Landor ( Christian Bale ) with future author Edgar Allan Poe ( Harry Melling ). Violence includes a woman being assaulted by three men; rape is mentioned. Expect gory images with blood, dead bodies, death by suicide, fighting, beating, punching, threatening with weapons, a human heart, dead animals, fire, and violent dialogue. A couple is seen lying in bed together in an intimate way, and there's a lewd sex-related poem. Language includes two uses of "f--k," a use of "Christ almighty," and a use of "my God." Characters drink socially throughout, mostly beer and in pubs, as well as some shots of liquor. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

Parents say (3)
Kids say (1)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Finally a watchable American movie!

All kinds of awful, what's the story.

In THE PALE BLUE EYE, it's 1830, and detective Augustus Landor ( Christian Bale ) has been summoned to West Point Military Academy. A cadet named Leroy Fry has been found hanged by the neck -- and, worse, his heart has been surgically removed from his chest. As Landor starts investigating these crimes, he discovers that the academy is eager to protect its reputation and to cover up any nasty business. Landor is approached by cadet E.A. Poe ( Harry Melling ), who offers his opinions on the killings. Landor decides to enlist Poe's help, hopefully using his macabre poet's mind to get more of the inside dirt on the academy's goings-on. But what they eventually uncover is far darker than anyone could have guessed.

Is It Any Good?

This period mystery has a few flaws in its logic, but its stellar cast, some good twists, and a crisp, wintry atmosphere add up to a sturdy, bleak film that should pair well with a hot mug of cocoa. Based on a novel by Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye isn't exactly the kind of mystery that viewers will be able to solve; it's not clue-oriented like Death on the Nile or Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery . And it has one major element that doesn't exactly make sense (which can't be explained without giving too much away). But, nevertheless, thanks to unfussy direction by filmmaker Scott Cooper , it's satisfying to watch all of the pieces click together, especially in locations like a creepy icehouse and a tavern lit by flickering candles stuck to tables by mounds of wax.

The casting of Melling ( Harry Potter 's Dudley Dursley) as Poe is inspired, and he's quite a character, a cunning and loquacious Southern gentleman who's the perfect complement to Bale's serious, dispirited detective. Gillian Anderson gets some laughs as the slightly improper wife of the school's doctor ( Toby Jones ), and Robert Duvall has a couple of potent scenes as a scholar of the occult, surrounded by shelves full of ancient tomes. Timothy Spall and Simon McBurney play stern officers at the academy, Charlotte Gainsbourg is Landor's part-time lover, and Lucy Boynton is the sister of one cadet who catches Poe's eye. The cast strikes sparks off of one another, ensuring that, in The Pale Blue Eye , there's always something interesting to see.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Pale Blue Eye 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Why are people drawn to murder mysteries?

How is drinking depicted in the movie? Is it glamorized? Are there consequences? Why does that matter?

What is the nature of revenge? Can it be good? Bad? Both? How?

How is the real-life figure Edgar Allan Poe used as part of this fictional story? Did it make you want to learn more about Poe? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 23, 2022
On DVD or streaming : January 6, 2023
Cast : Christian Bale , Harry Melling , Lucy Boynton
Director : Scott Cooper
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Netflix
Genre : Thriller
Topics : Book Characters
Run time : 128 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : some violent content and bloody images
Last updated : February 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The Pale Blue Eye Review

The Pale Blue Eye

With the whodunnit enjoying a comeback via the likes of Glass Onion , See How They Run and Death On The Nile , the time's surely ripe for a murder-mystery movie which involves the genre's very inventor. However, neither Louis Bayard’s original 2006 novel The Pale Blue Eye nor this moody adaptation by Scott Cooper ( Crazy Heart , Hostiles ) go as far as to make Edgar Allan Poe the lead detective. More intriguingly, he is the recruited sidekick: part assistant, part observer, part possible suspect.

This gives Cooper (as it did Bayard) the opportunity to dot Poe-ish Easter eggs around the narrative, especially given we meet him as a young man (played by one-time Dudley Dursley, Harry Melling ) who is bound to be moulded by the macabre events that occur during his time at West Point. However, the focus is more on Christian Bale as Augustus Landor: a dour fellow with a robust reputation as a New York City constable, now retired and a West Point local. He is prone to a tipple, a recent widower, and has a missing daughter, all of which make his mood darker and frostier than his wintry, Gothic surroundings.

The climax is as bloody as it is bloody ridiculous.

This is where the initial promise of The Pale Blue Eye starts to leak away. Bale has done great work with Cooper before, in Out Of The Furnace and Hostiles , but Landor just isn’t a very interesting protagonist. Unlike Benoit Blanc or the Branagh-portrayed Poirot, he has no flair, no charm, no engaging quirks or investigative style. He scowls, grumbles and rubs his starchy employers (stalwart but misplaced Brits Timothy Spall and Simon McBurney) the wrong way. A lack of tact can’t be mistaken for a personality.

There is considerable compensation in the shape of Melling, who brings some much-needed colour; he even sports an outrageous Benoit Blanc-ish Kentucky-fried accent (though Poe was from Boston). After showing promise in The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs and The Devil All The Time , this is Melling’s true breakthrough, as he pulls off the tricky, square-circling act of making the young Poe as attractive as he is peculiar, as likeable as he is arrogant.

But even he can’t hold the film together as the story eventually veers into hokey occult territory, with a bonneted, buck-toothed Gillian Anderson seemingly parachuted in from a long-lost Coen brothers caper as a West Point brat’s unhinged Mommy. The climax is as bloody as it is bloody ridiculous, while the final reveal just doesn’t click; the ‘who’ in this whodunnit fails to convince in terms of the ‘why’ and the ‘how’. A careful rewatch might perhaps help, but it’s unlikely you’ll feel inspired to attempt one.

Movies | 07 12 2022

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The Pale Blue Eye movie review: Harry Melling outshines charismatic Christian Bale in Netflix’s
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Movie Review: 'The Pale Blue Eye': A 19th-century whodunit
The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

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දියණිය වෙනුවෙන් තාත්තා කරපු විනාශය
The Pale Blue Eye Movie
The Pale Blue Eye
THE PALE BLUE EYE (2022)
"The Pale Blue Eye " Movie Explain In Hindi ||Climax आप का दिमाक खराप कर देगा ||🤯🤯🤯#murdermystery

COMMENTS

The Pale Blue Eye movie review (2022)
One thing a movie watcher might not be looking for during the actual bleak midwinter is more bleak midwinter on the screen. Full disclosure: "The Pale Blue Eye," written and directed by Scott Cooper and starring his frequent collaborator Christian Bale, set in New York's more-rugged-than-today Hudson Valley in 1830, is thoroughly suffused with bleak mid-winterness.
The Pale Blue Eye
The Pale Blue Eye. 63% Tomatometer 189 Reviews 69% Audience Score 1,000+ Ratings West Point, 1830. In the early hours of a gray winter morning, a cadet is found dead. But after the body arrives at ...
'The Pale Blue Eye' Review: Stolen Hearts and Tortured Minds
The real mystery here is how any of the actors made it through the movie without resorting to a neck brace. The Pale Blue Eye Rated R for frozen corpses and an unexpected castration. Running time ...
The Pale Blue Eye
Full Review | Aug 3, 2023. The Pale Blue Eye is beautiful, and its script coherent and clean. While its story may not inspire a second watch, it is a film that relishes in its tone, atmosphere ...
The Pale Blue Eye (2022)
The Pale Blue Eye: Directed by Scott Cooper. With Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Simon McBurney, Timothy Spall. A world-weary detective is hired to investigate the murder of a West Point cadet. Stymied by the cadets' code of silence, he enlists one of their own to help unravel the case - a young man the world would come to know as Edgar Allan Poe.
'The Pale Blue Eye' Review: Christian Bale in a Gloomy ...
"The Pale Blue Eye" is one of those movie titles that's evocative yet teasingly vague — it makes the film sound like a Western based on a song by Lou Reed. Actually, the movie is based on ...
'The Pale Blue Eye' Review: Christian Bale in Period Murder Mystery
By David Rooney. December 22, 2022 9:00am. Christian Bale in 'The Pale Blue Eye' Scott Garfield/Netflix. A dour slow burn of a movie that never catches fire — even when a crime scene is set ...
Review: Christian Bale in Netflix Mystery The Pale Blue Eye
Movie review: Christian Bale and Harry Melling star in the new atmospheric Netflix mystery The Pale Blue Eye. Veteran detective Augustus Landor and young cadet Edgar Allan Poe investigate murders ...
Pale Blue Eye Review: Christian Bale & Edgar Allen Poe Play Detective
'The Pale Blue Eye' Review: Christian Bale and Edgar Allen Poe Catch a Killer in Sleepy, Hollow Mystery ... Film Review 'The Great Lillian Hall' Review: Jessica Lange Is a Diva Battling ...
The Pale Blue Eye review: Christian Bale in a chilly murder mystery
The Pale Blue Eye review: Christian Bale chases down a chilly murder mystery. Bale's flinty Victorian detective finds his odd-couple match in Harry Melling as a young Edgar Allan Poe, even if this ...
The Pale Blue Eye review: Christian Bale gets pulpy in a ...
The Pale Blue Eye is streaming on Netflix now. Antlers director Scott Cooper and Harry Potter star Harry Melling (as Edgar Allan Poe) put a lurid, chilly spin on a murder mystery that's at its ...
The Pale Blue Eye
The Pale Of Blue Eye is one of the most clever and intriguing Mystery Thriller film i've ever watch, an unpredictable twist after twist that are so smart and quite shocking, an incredible build up from the beginning to the end fills with the obvious great performance by Christian Bale but the one that for me stood out the most is Harry Melling as Edgar Allan Poe, his performance deserve an ...
'The Pale Blue Eye' review: Christian Bale meets Edgar Allan Poe
Dec. 22, 2022 9 AM PT. What "The Pale Blue Eye," a gothic mystery-thriller adapted by director Scott Cooper from Louis Bayard's 2006 novel, may lack in fully propulsive storytelling and ...
'The Pale Blue Eye' Review: Christian Bale's Netflix Murder-Mystery
The Pale Blue Eye, written and directed by Scott Cooper and based on the 2003 Louis Bayard novel of the same name, is only ostensibly a movie about a mystery. Really, it's a movie fixated on the ...
The Pale Blue Eye Review: Christian Bale Dives Into Edgar ...
Scott Cooper expertly adapts Louis Bayard's novel The Pale Blue Eye, with Christan Bale and Harry Melling at the heart of the mystery. ... Movie Reviews. By Maggie Lovitt. Published Dec 22, 2022 ...
The Pale Blue Eye review: an unpredictable gothic thriller
The Pale Blue Eye is a visually rich, intentionally tricky gothic thriller. It's the closest director Scott Cooper has ever come to making a purely straightforward piece of genre entertainment ...
The Pale Blue Eye film review
Maybe The Pale Blue Eye is meant to be a double bill: two ill-fitting movies sharing a title. One half gets ever more outlandish. There are ancestral secrets, whispers of devil worship, Anderson ...
The Pale Blue Eye
Movie Review. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? This question, posed by author Edgar Allan Poe, is examined when the dead body of a cadet attending the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1830 is discovered. ... The Pale Blue Eye ...
The Pale Blue Eye Review
The only truly creepy thing about The Pale Blue Eye is its own zombified existence. It looks like a movie. It travels in the body of one, with similar motions you might be able to recognize from ...
'The Pale Blue Eye': A 19th-century whodunit
Christian Bale, left, and Harry Melling in "The Pale Blue Eye." (Scott Garfield/Netflix) ( 2.5 stars) Writer-director Scott Cooper may be as perfect an interpreter as can be imagined for ...
The Pale Blue Eye Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 3 ): Kids say ( 1 ): This period mystery has a few flaws in its logic, but its stellar cast, some good twists, and a crisp, wintry atmosphere add up to a sturdy, bleak film that should pair well with a hot mug of cocoa. Based on a novel by Louis Bayard, The Pale Blue Eye isn't exactly the kind of mystery that viewers ...
The Pale Blue Eye
The Pale Blue Eye Review. West Point, New York, 1830. When a cadet at the burgeoning military academy is found hanged with his heart cut out, the top brass summons former New York City constable ...
The Pale Blue Eye
The Pale Blue Eye is a 2022 American mystery thriller film written and directed by Scott Cooper, adapted from the 2006 novel of the same name by Louis Bayard. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Simon McBurney, Timothy Spall, and Robert Duvall.

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Reviewed at Paris Theater, Dec. 19, 2022. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 128 MIN.

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